Standards and Research: like Slinky-Dog

Nov 14, 2013

From my friend Heather over at Archetypical:

I’m not knocking the standards development process. Where there are well established processes and a chance of consensus amongst parties being achieved we have a great starting point for a standard, and the potential for ongoing engagement and refinement into the future. But…A standards organisation is NOT the place to conduct research. It is like oil and water – they should be clearly separated. A standards development organisation is a place to consolidate and formalise well established knowledge and/or processes.

It’s not that I disagree with Heather, but..

It’s not quite so simple in collaborative spaces.

I certainly agree that standards development is not the place to do real research - that needs to be risky: to have a real chance of failure. Or it’s not innovation, and if it’s not innovative, it can’t be called research (see The Pipeline’s rant on this subject). And standards aren’t structured to do research, and shouldn’t.

But in order to be effective, researchers need to work together, and to investigate the novel in the presence of a common base, so that their work is comparable. And to create that, you need standards.

So research needs standards so it can happen.

And standards need research so they know where to go.

It’s kind of like this, with research at the front, and standards at the back:

I find this a useful mental model when evaluating the direction that standards I’m involved should go with:

  • Standards and Research shouldn’t try to stretch too far apart
  • Standards enable research, and then catch up so research can go further

(And, btw, I think that the DCM standard Heather was actually blogging about fails this test here - it’s trying to get standards in front of research)